Preserving Vaccination
Exemption Choice:The Legal And Scientific Issues
By Tim O’Shea, D.C.
In every state of the union except two (Mississippi and West Virginia), parents
have the legal right to exempt their children from all vaccinations. Whether
or not others disagree with that decision is immaterial to that right. In light
of the social and political opposition to such a choice, parents who would embark
upon this unpopular course of action often have to face much greater obstacles
than just learning about the dangers of vaccines.
The parents can become victims of uninformed people in authority who think they
can enforce their own illegal opinions upon the public.
Dr. Colleen Conger-Brass and Dr. Michael Brass found themselves in just such
a situation. They have a 9-year-old son Sean, who is in the third grade at a
San Jose, Calif., school. On Feb. 27, 2001, they received a phone call from
the school principal, with whom they have a good relationship.
The principal informed the couple that they had a choice: Either Sean must be
put back into another grade, or else he must be kept at home, indefinitely.
The reason? Sean’s teacher was pregnant and her OB-GYN had just informed
her and the principal that being exposed to an unvaccinated child would place
her fetus at risk of birth defects.
This is a reference to the extremely rare possibility of birth defects supposedly
possible for a woman who contracts rubella in the first four months of pregnancy.
The pregnant teacher had been vaccinated for rubella with the standard MMR shots.
Not wishing their son’s school progress to be disrupted, the parents opted
to keep Sean at home. For the next week, they agonized about the situation,
trying to find some legal or scientific way out of the dilemma. It was shocking
and baffling to them that their child could be suddenly deprived of his education
just because they had exercised their legal right not to vaccinate.
During this time, the parents contacted the Santa Clara County Health Department
to see what its stance was. The department responded immediately with a letter,
which stated that in all of Santa Clara County there had only been two cases
of rubella since 1992, with the exception of a small epidemic that occurred
in a local jail. Two cases in nine years had been recorded in a county with
over one million people.
The letter also quoted California Health and Safety Codes, Section 12035, that
provides for a child to be excluded from school if he has been exposed to a
communicable disease. And in this case, the Santa Clara County Health Department
stated that obviously “there is no reason to believe an exposure to rubella
has occurred.”
Still, the school persisted in excluding the child. The principal was relying
on the incorrect, and wildly unscientific, opinion of the OB-GYN, who had sent
the school a letter apparently claiming that there was a high likelihood of
birth defects from Sean being in the same classroom with the vaccinated pregnant
teacher. The parents, at their wit’s end, were given no time estimate about
how long this arbitrary and illegal exclusion would continue.
Finally, on March 6, the principal called from the school to inform the Drs.
Brass that Sean could return to school because the teacher had left, apparently
at the advice of her OB-GYN. It seems likely that the school’s lawyers
had informed the principal of the school’s tenuous legal position in excluding
a legally exempted and perfectly healthy child from attending school.
So now everything is fine, right? The family has to suffer great emotional trauma,
and the child loses part of his education while those in authority figure out
what the law is. No harm, no foul, right?
Let’s take a closer look at what really happened here.
The unconscionable situation that this doctor imagines he can arbitrarily impose
upon these parents calls up two areas of concern:
- issues of law and
- issues of science.
Issues of Law
Article 3, Section 6025, of the California Health and Safety Codes states: “Any
pupil age 18 months or older who has received all the immunizations … required
for his/her age … or who has documented a permanent medical exemption or
a permanent beliefs exemption to immunization … shall be admitted unconditionally
as a pupil to a given public or private elementary or secondary school, [or]
child care center.”
This law is very clear. These parents have signed the California exemption form,
as provided by state and federal law. These laws are not subject to interpretation
by unilateral, arbitrary self-appointed guardians of the public health. The
issues of exemption from vaccination have been decided in meticulous detail
by the U.S. Department of Public Health, as well as by the California Department
of Health and Safety, after years of study.
This doctor sought to place himself above state and federal law by imagining
that he has had some new insight into the whole medical-legal arena of immunization
which heretofore had never occurred to any of the experts, and luckily he has
arrived just in time to save us.
Such hubris is egregious enough in itself, but what is even more remarkable
is that the school principal followed this ill-considered course of action without
question, and he immediately removed the child from the classroom. This action
is the second, independent decision for which the school may now bear responsibility
and liability for violations of the parents’ rights to education without
discrimination.
In practice outside New York City, attorney James Filenbaum specializes in cases
involving violations of parents’ rights to exemption from immunization
and in vaccine damages compensation cases. In a telephone discussion about the
Sean Brass case, Filenbaum explained some of the possible dangers such a school
may be looking at by relying on an incorrect and untenable medical opinion.
For a school to deprive a perfectly healthy child of his legal right to education
because of some highly speculative and very eccentric medical opinions may violate
civil rights that are specifically defined in federal law (Federal Title 28,
Section 1983).
Issues of Science
The doctor’s position may be summarized as follows: He has the notion that
since the teacher is pregnant, she is susceptible to getting rubella from the
unvaccinated child, and transferring the disease to her unborn fetus, resulting
in a likelihood of birth defects—in spite of the fact that the teacher
herself has taken the MMR vaccine.
Trying to follow the logic of such reasoning is a daunting task. Since the teacher
is vaccinated, shouldn’t that make her immune to the disease? If she is
immune to the disease, what difference does it make even if this child gets
the disease? Wasn’t the purpose of the vaccine to protect her from the
disease? So now the doctor wants the child to be vaccinated with that same vaccine
in order to protect the child from the disease? But if vaccination didn’t
protect the teacher, why would it protect the student?
First of all, this doctor is creating undue hysteria by imagining multiple events,
each of which has only a remote possibility of occurring alone. The chances
of them occurring in sequence are infinitesimal. Those events are:
- That the child will get
rubella in the next few weeks, before the teacher becomes four months pregnant.
- That the teacher would
catch rubella from the child before he stayed home sick.
- That the teacher would
spread the disease to the fetus, and that would cause a birth defect.
Let’s look at the first event. The student is not sick now. In a county
of one million people, there had been only two cases of rubella in the past
nine years.The incidence of rubella in the U.S. is now at its lowest rate in
history (Merck Manual, p. 237). The rare danger of a mother getting rubella
during pregnancy is only in the first 16 weeks, as far as a fetus is concerned
(Merck Manual, p. 2185). The teacher was already at 12 weeks. So what are the
chances of this healthy student being one of the two in a million cases of rubella
in nine years during the next four weeks? You couldn’t place the bet!
One can’t help but wonder: Where would Sean get the rubella from, if all
the other kids in the school were vaccinated? Doesn’t their vaccinations
work?
Now, consider the second event: The teacher catches rubella from the student.
But how could that happen? She’s already been vaccinated. And let’s
not forget the prime fact here: This child is totally healthy. It would take
a lot more than medical paranoia to make him sick.
Finally, examine the third event: What are the chances of birth defects? According
to the latest edition of the Merck Manual, the chances of birth defects are
less than 3 percent as a result of the mother getting the vaccine during early
pregnancy (p. 2328). The chances of birth defects from the mother contracting
natural rubella disease are so low they have not been calculated. No figure
is even estimated in Merck.
So, taking all three of these events together, they would have to happen in
sequence in order for this student to cause a birth defect in the teacher’s
fetus. Such a likelihood is astronomically low. The chances are much greater
that the woman would be killed in an auto accident during the same time period.
It would make more sense to take away her driver’s license.
Let’s introduce some rational discourse into this overblown situation.
Virtually all medical sources agree that rubella has historically been a mild,
self-limiting childhood disease which required no treatment. Most baby boomers
got the disease, had slight discomfort for a week and now have full immunity
for life.
In the early 1960s along came the MMR vaccine, a trivalent that was never tested
as such (Wakefield). Mendelsohn estimates that an 85 percent immunity to this
mild disease existed before the vaccine was introduced. So they needed a selling
point—a big scare. Suddenly, with no solid statistics of incidence, the
remote possibility of fetal damage became the slogan that won FDA approval and
inclusion into the mandated schedule. Since then, we’ve never looked back.
Immunity and Side Effects
All these shenanigans still wouldn’t be so bad if the vaccine were harmless.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Even Merck admits that the vaccine
only confers immunity for “about 11 years.” That’s not immunity.
Real immunity is for life. Real immunity is something only the human body can
create after getting a disease.
The problem with rubella is that the vaccinated can still contract it after
the artificial immunity wears off. But by that time, they’re usually adults,
and the atypical version is a much more serious disease in adulthood.
You may be surprised to learn that we traded a mild disease that has been around
for centuries, causing very little trouble, for a serious mutation that is doing
its part in the de-evolution of the human genome.
Viera Scheibner, Ph.D., the premier Australian researcher in the area of vaccinations,
hammers home the most devastating side effect of experimental vaccines like
MMR and DPT. Worse than the side effects listed, even including the occasional
death, is the evolutionary cul de sac in which our disregard of the scientific
method is entrapping us.
Scheibner likens what vaccines are doing to our collective human DNA—our
genome—to making a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of something. Look at it
after 10 generations, then after 50 generations, of constant de-evolution, diluting
and weakening the DNA that took our species a million years to evolve.
So what do we learn from case of Sean Brass? It is hoped that we will learn
the rules of law and science that come to bear on this situation. These parents
had a sovereign right to choose not to vaccinate their son. Even those of us
who may not agree with that decision must agree at least to their right to make
it. Because those personal freedoms that we do not defend are being inexorably
eroded away, day by day, by a thousand little media slurs and a thousand shrugged
shoulders.
What would be the chances of the first 10 constitutional amendments making it
through Congress today? Slim to none. Most people don’t even know what
the Bill of Rights is. America is the only country in the history of the world
that would even consider placing all that freedom, and all that power, in the
hands of the people.
Most Americans seem to think it’s fine to hand these hard-won, precious
rights back to the government, because they’re too busy to educate themselves
about the principles involved. Study vaccines? That’s my doctor’s
job. I can’t be bothered to learn what’s good for my children and
then demand it.
The right to choose chiropractic care? That’s up to my insurance. I can’t
be bothered to learn what’s good for my body and then demand it.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
About the author: Tim O’Shea, D.C., a 1986 Life Chiropractic College
West graduate, is an author and lecturer in the areas of chiropractic, nutrition
and vaccines. He has been in private practice in San Jose, Calif., since 1990.
He is the author of The Sanctity of Human Blood and presents seminars in the
U.S. and Europe. For more information, visit his web site at www.thedoctorwithin.com.
© Copyright 2002 Today's Chiropractic